Our privacy policy

In short:

StartPage does not collect or share personal information. We don't track or profile you.

The longer version:

StartPage is strongly committed to protecting the privacy of its user community and is dedicated to ensure that your search information cannot be linked back to you. This privacy policy details the - very limited and non-personal - information Startpage.com ("StartPage") may gather and our disclosure policy.

What is Personal Information

Information is regarded as personal when it tells something about a human being who is or can be (uniquely) identified.This definition stems from European law, which applies to StartPage, and is intentionally broad in order to provide a high level of privacy protection.

This means, for example, that not just names and e-mail addresses can be personal information, but also numbers or other identifiers, such as your IP-address, to the extent that they link other information to a specific human being.

IP Addresses

The IP address that is associated with your search will NOT be recorded or shared.In order to prevent the unpleasant possibility that anything you ever search for online could be traced back to you via your IP-address, we do not record or share the IP address of any of our visitors.

The only exception is for abusive (automated) queriers that rapidly submit more queries to StartPage in a short time than any normal human possibly would.

Data Collection

We don't collect any personal information about our visitors.This is a first and very important condition to safeguard your privacy. If personal information isnt collected, it cant be stolen, demanded, leaked or exposed.

In fact, the only information we do record is an aggregate total of how many searches are performed on our website each day (a measure of overall traffic), and, some other strictly non-personal statistics. Such statistics may include the number of times our service is accessed by a type of operating system, a type of browser, a language, etc.or a combination thereof.

We only count the numbers and are in no way able to know what your specific operating system, browser, language settings, etc may be, because we do not record that information.

When you use StartPage, we do not record your IP address, we do not record the browser connected with your search (Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, Chrome etc.), the computer platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.) connected with your search, and we do not record your search words or phrases themselves.

Please note that search queries may convey personal information (think of someone entering their own name and/or social security number). Although we do not record your search queries, all queries are submitted to Google anonymously, as this is required to receive search results.

Cookies

StartPage does not use tracking or identifying cookies.

Preferences

Cookies are small pieces of data that are sent and saved to your computer's hard drive when visiting sites. StartPage uses only one anonymous cookie called "preferences". This cookie is to remember the search preferences you saved for your next visit. It expires after not visiting StartPage for 90 days.

You can choose to accept or refuse cookies by changing the settings of your browser. It should be noted, however, that your Startpage.com preferences will not work properly if your cookies are turned off. It is possible to accept cookies from selected sites only.

You can periodically delete cookies from your computer's hard drive, clearing out all historical data that may have been saved from your previous web surfing. If you delete cookies and return to a website, there is no cookie to recognize you by.

To promote a cookie-free internet, StartPage has a URL generator which eradicates the need for setting a cookie. It remembers your settings in a privacy friendly manner. It can be found at the bottom of the SETTINGS page.

Email Addresses

StartPage will not sell or disclose your contact information to any third parties.When you send comments, questions, suggestions, or feedback to StartPage via email or through our support center, and include an email address and/or contact information, StartPage may use this information to respond to you. By submitting feedback you also allow us to detect which browser and operating system you are using, information that will exclusively be used for helping to better understand and solve any reported issues better. StartPage will not sell or disclose your contact information to any third parties. We may, however, very occasionally send emails to our users regarding StartPage company information. This service is opt-in and includes the option to unsubscribe.

External Links

After clicking on a search result, you leave the protection offered by StartPage, unless you use our unique proxy function to protect your identity.Please note that this privacy policy applies only to the Startpage.com website. StartPage is a search engine, and an advertising publisher, so you will find various links on our site, including but not limited to search results and sponsored results. These sites are owned and maintained by independent companies, over which StartPage has no control, and who are not covered by this privacy policy. StartPage is not liable or responsible for the content of these sites, or their collection and use of information.

StartPage prevents the leakage of your search terms to third parties by using the so called POST method by default instead of the GET method, which is used by many other search providers. The POST method keeps your search terms out of the logs of webmasters of sites that you reach from our results. Search terms tell a lot about what you are thinking, which is why this is a privacy issue. With the POST method StartPage uses, your search terms are stripped off. This can cause "Web page has expired" messages and prevents from creating shortcuts of results-pages but is preferred from a privacy perspective. To create shortcuts you can use the "Bookmark this search" button on the right of the results page. Alternatively you can switch off "Use POST vs. GET" completely in SETTINGS.

StartPage also offers a proxy function that allows the users to see the information on external sites without disclosing their IP address to these sites. Further information on this great privacy tool can be found here.

To fully protect our users from the privacy risks of the Facebook and Twitter social media plugins, we have implemented a two-step approach to show these icons on our site.

Information Sharing

StartPage does not share personal information with any third party, including its provider(s) of regular or sponsored search results.When you perform a search on StartPage, the search phrase must be sent to the provider(s) of the search results, so that they can be generated and presented to you on the StartPage website.

Some results pages on StartPage include a small number of clearly labeled sponsored links to generate revenue and cover operational costs. Those links are retrieved from platforms such as Google Adwords. Because we dont profile you, the ads are not individually tailored to users. In order to enable the prevention of click fraud, some non-identifying system information is transmitted to the sponsored results provider(s). We never share your IP address or other data that would uniquely identify you.

No tracking cookies are used, so there is no cookie information to be shared.

Governmental Requests

StartPage is headquartered in The Netherlands, Europe. Because we don't store any personal information to begin with, StartPage is unlikely to receive any requests by governments to hand over data about our users. In the seventeen years we've been in business, we have never received any such request.

If we ever do receive a request from Dutch judicial authorities to hand over certain information, we will have our lawyers check the validity of the request and determine whether we are obliged to comply. We will not comply with such requests unless we are convinced that the request is legally valid and we believe that it is undeniably our legal obligation to comply.

We will not comply with requests from any authorities other than Dutch authorities. If we receive a request from any foreign government, we will refuse to comply and will instead instruct the requestor to place a formal request to the Dutch authorities for mutual assistance.

StartPage will never cooperate with any voluntary surveillance programs. Under the strong laws that protect the right to privacy in Europe, European governments cannot legally force service providers like StartPage to implement a blanket-spying program on their users.

Underage Children

We believe that protecting children's privacy online is very important. Note that we do not collect any personal data about our users at all. As a consequence StartPage does not request, collect, or share personal information from persons who are underage.

The Right to be Forgotten

Subject to certain conditions, citizens in the EU are given the right to request the deletion of their personal data when they are inaccurate, inadequate, or irrelevant or no longer relevant. More information can be found here.

Your Privacy, Our Future

We strongly believe that we have the legal right to safeguard the privacy of our users by encrypting and not collecting their personal information, and to keep doing so.

Given the strong protection of the right to privacy in Europe, European governments cannot legally start forcing service providers like us to implement a blanket spying program on their users. If that ever changed, we would fight this to the end.

PrivacyIt's not just our Policy - it's our Mission!

Operator

Startpage.com is owned and operated by Surfboard Holding BV, Postbus 1079, 3700 BB Zeist The Netherlands. Representative for the Privacy Policy is Robert E.G. Beens. ()

Information Sharing

Some results pages on StartPage include a small number of clearly labeled sponsored links to cover operational costs. Those links are retrieved from platforms such as Google Adwords. The ads are NOT individually tailored to users, and StartPage does NOT record any personal information or share personal information with the providers of sponsored links at any time. Clicking on any search result without the use of the proxy will take the user to the third-party website and away from the protection of StartPage. This is the case with all external pages, including our sponsored links. Note: the proxy can help you visit all regular search results anonymously but as you can see, there is no such option for visiting the sponsored links, as the advertisers need means to detect click fraud scams.

StartPage's top priority is protecting the privacy of our users, while providing a quality service.

The URL-generator

Save settings without cookies

You can save your StartPage preferences by clicking on the "Save Setting" button on the "Settings" page.

This will save your settings on your computer in a 'cookie'- a small piece of data stored on your hard drive - called 'preferences'.

StartPage's 'preferences' cookie is a non-identifiable cookie and safe to accept, but cookies in general can pose a threat to your privacy.

People who prefer not to accept cookies or delete them regularly would not be able to keep their preferences this way.

For those people, StartPage has especially provided the "Generate URL" button at the bottom of the "Settings" page.